Earlier this week, we announced a preview of Google Cloud DNS, an authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) service that gives developers a highly available, reliable, and inexpensive way to publish DNS zones and records. Using a simple standards-based API, developers can create and manage their own DNS records. The service's globally distributed nameservers respond to DNS queries to help efficiently route user traffic to servers and web applications.

Cloud DNS can be used to name hosts, webservers and other internet resources, including Google Compute Engine virtual machines, and Google Cloud Storage buckets. You can also use this service for zones and records for systems hosted in your datacenters and remote offices. Cloud DNS serves from more than 20 locations globally, and is based on the same principles and similar infrastructure implemented in Google’s authoritative service used for all Google properties which services billions of queries daily. Cloud DNS’ global, anycast-based network of DNS nameservers responds to end user queries from an optimal location, resulting in low DNS query latency, thereby increasing the access speed and improving the overall experience of end users.

Cloud DNS offers a self-service sign up with an affordable pay-as-you-go model. You pay for the number of managed zones plus records, and for the number of queries serviced for those zones and records. The service is competitively priced at $0.40 per one million queries per month for the first billion queries, and $0.20 per hosted zone per month for the first 25 zones. More details are available at http://developers.google.com/cloud-dns.

You’re welcome to start using the service today by logging into the Google Developers Console and enabling the Cloud DNS API from the APIs menu as shown here: